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The embattled Internal Revenue Service faces a 24 percent cut to its budget next year, under a spending plan introduced by the House Appropriations Committee Tuesday. The IRS funding was included in the committee's Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill, which also includes funding for the Treasury Department, the General Services Administration and the Executive Office of the President. The subcommittee is set to mark up the proposal Wednesday.

Let's get funds for the IRS by reforming their Austin ITIN center. Workers there OKed $4.2 billion in refunds to illegal aliens based on mostly obviously fraudulent returns in tax yr 2011. The Inspector General report of July 2012, online at tinyurl.com/badirs, has recommendations that have yet to be acted on. Cut the fraud. Save $4 billion/year.

$4 billion a year in a $2.5 trillion dollar a year budget is 0.15%. It is certainly worth looking into, but Congress wastes more than that in a day. They are forcing DoD to purchase 300 tanks at a total cost of more than that even after the Army has told them they don't have the manpower or the budget to even maintain 300 more tanks. They are keeping dozens of bases open even when they are half empty, at a cost of billions per year. They spent a billion dollars on a new visitors center for the Capital Building so they could put it underground. Sure IRS makes mistakes, so does everyone else. The real problem is that Congress does it all the time and with intent. IRS is working on your alleged $4 billion per year, but Congress is only trying to spend more money and provide fewer services to the public.

As a former employee of this Agency, all I can saw is there is so much waste at the IRS that if they actually looked at their processes this could be absorbed with no impact. For example, when I arrived I had to sit at my desk for weeks waiting for my new laptop to be built and shipped from Utah to Maryland!! One word- Union. I was paid to be unproductive for a month while some techie down the hall could have built one in a few hours. Multiply this kind of procedural waste and it comes into millions of dollars. Money was squandered on "IT Pilots" and "proof of concepts" just for the sake of being able to show a benefit or a product that was unwanted or unneeded. There are some good people there, but they are stuck in a 1960's bureaucracy and process that needs to be modernized from the top down. The IRS needs a funding cut so that they are forced to look at what they do and the associated processes and start to do what the rest of the Government has done years ago.

It takes money to make changes. You can't award contracts to update software and hardware without money. Government agencies with more money can afford to keep extra computers lying around waiting for new people to come on board, not penny pinching ones. Working with fewer resources has never "fixed" anything. Those proof of concept projects you have so much contempt for were at least attempts to make improvements. A 25% cut to their budget will mean there will be no more new ideas, only feeble attempts to do more of the same with less. Motivated workers will find better pay elsewhere and burned out workers will keep plodding along.

Cut the one federal agency that actually makes money and try to balance the budget when they know this will mean less revenue. At least we don't have to worry about getting caught cheating on our taxes next year. They won't have the staff to audit you. Want to create a tax exempt organization to hide income then go ahead, that office is being gutted. Want to send your money overseas to avoid taxation, feel free, because that is the real target of this whole thing. IRS finally made progress in opening up foreign bank records to find tax cheats and Congress has found an excuse to shut them down. They will barely have the staff to process tax returns. Of course, if you are expecting a refund, I wouldn't be holding my breath next year.